Marketers that feel there is just not enough time to spend on email marketing, you may be slightly comforted to know that you are not alone.

The bid to keep up with the evolving nature of email marketing is a challenge many organisations are struggling with, according to marketers that attended Econsultancy’s Festival of Marketing.

Several senior client-side marketers gathered together for Digital Cream during the Festival, where email marketing, among other topics, was discussed at great lengths.

The general consensus? Emaiil has great potential to become even more efficient than it already is. It's just going to take skills, buy-in and time that many do not have... yet.

While these discussions were under the Chatham House Rules, the insights gleaned have been pulled together to create the new Email Marketing Trends Briefing published this week by Econsultancy in association with Pure360.

The trends briefing, which is free for registered users, also contains some best practice tips, market data and case studies.

Writing an email subject line is a fine art that requires a high level of creativity as well as careful analysis of what customers respond to.

It’s not easy coming up with varied topics that pique the reader’s interest while avoid becoming monotonous or relying too heavily on sales and promotions.

Luckily there are a huge number of case studies published online that help to give marketers inspiration by revealing the type of content and tactics that will increase engagement. But that doesn't mean that the subject line can be neglected in favour of focusing on the email content.

Email frequency in general has been a hot topic recently. Whatever your opinion or approach is on this topic, it’s inevitable that your email frequency is going to increase over the upcoming holiday period.

Relevancy and context are a powerful combination of factors that can have a huge impact on the success of digital marketing campaigns.

A good example of this are triggered emails that are sent in response to a particular customer action or behaviour.

As one would probably expect, triggered emails have a far higher open rate than standard email newsletters.

Data from ExpertSender shows that the average open rate for triggered emails was consistently around 45% to 55% for the year to date, some four times higher compared to email newsletters which averaged around 10%.

Often when we think about email marketing we’re considering the proactive angle, such is email’s power as a direct marketing tool to drive sales.

But it’s equally powerful as a reactive channel. How it’s used for those who are buying, or thinking about buying, is a crucial part of the purchase journey. It can be the dividing line between whether customers buy from you again, or buy from you at all.

We recently purchased items from 40 of the top online retailers in the UK and the US, marking their performance for use of email throughout the purchase journey.